Mark Zuckerberg reflects on Facebook's game-changing feature

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently penned a post on the social network commemorating the 10-year anniversary of something that’s become a part of billions of peoples’ daily lives – the News Feed.

Zuckerberg notes that in the beginning (and for a period of two years), there was no News Feed as Facebook at that time was little more than a collection of profiles. You could visit your friends’ pages and glean basic details but there was no way to see updates and ensure that they saw yours.

That changed with News Feed as you were suddenly able to see everything that was happening with your friends in a single place. Zuckerberg said it was such a fundamental idea that, even 10 years later, every major social app has its equivalent of News Feed.

As is often the case with change, not everyone was hip to News Feed. Shortly after launch, Zuckerberg recounts that around a million users joined a protest group threatening to leave the social network unless they reverted back to the original way of doing things. Incredibly enough, some people even protested News Feed’s implementation in the streets outside of Facebook’s office.

These days, News Feed serves as the heart and soul of the world’s largest social network. Facebook has added countless other features and services to its repertoire over the past decade en route to amassing more than 1.7 billion users but none of that would be possible without News Feed.